i was on a chat/prayer this evening, praying for the victims of the recent hurricane. we were talking some as well, and people were talking about the horrors of looting and cruelty that occurs in this situation, and kind of comparing it to what happened with the tsunami.
this is very interesting to me, as i have a very good friend who used to live in India, and who is now living in Nepal. she was greatly affected by the horrors of the tsunami. i too have spent some time in Asia, and have also experienced the life & culture there.
what is interesting to me is the different reactions that are based on the broader worldviews. the main difference of which i speak is the fatalism that accompanies much of the culture in Asia. in the US, we don't have that. we are entrapeneurs... we believe we can change things - we send money to Asia for the tsunami, and our whole country is mobilized and giving to the relief efforts of the hurricane.
this difference in worldview also accounts, i think, for the difference in the amounts of people doing horrible things. make no mistake, in Asia people are being taken advantage of. but you will not hear people talking about the unfairness of the effects of the tsunami on the rich vs. the poor, or feeling like they've been gypped out of something they were owed. in the cultural mindset of fatalism, what happens will happen and there is nothing that we can do about it.
here though - we fight, we grasp, we hold on, we work toward things... because we believe that we can make a difference. even way up here in the north, people are mobilizing, giving money, giving products, believing that we can make a difference. our culture is in no way fatalistic - we have been empowered by our philosophy on life to act and change our circumstances and the circumstances of others. so that's a really good thing. but the negative aspect is that a lot of people are also simply taking whatever they see for themselves.
so the cultural phenomena is very interesting to me.
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Interestingly enough, this trend does not extend towards inward phenomena. Take performance in math and science, for instance. People in asian cultures are much more likely to believe they can overcome a deficiency in talent by hard work and discipline. People in the west, especially in the US tend to believe something along the lines of "I'm just bad at math." So while our wealth has led us to believe we should be able to change the external things, and the poverty of many in asian nations has led them to simply accept acts of nature and things like birthright, we do not believe we can change ourselves, while they have confidence that they can.
That is a really interesting observation - and one that I hadn't thought of. It's not something that I noticed while living overseas, and not something that I noticed here.
I tend to spend time with people who have a "paradigm of growth" - who are looking to change not only the world around them, but to grow as well. But you are right, in that there are relatively few here in the States. I just had never attributed that to their broader worldview.
This brings to mind the question - what would a culture look like that embraced both a "paradigm of change" and a "paradigm of growth"?
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